That was the only thing redeeming about LoTR:Online. It was pretty fun the first few days, but it got boring really fast for me. Don't get me wrong though. It's a great community which seems to gather the more mature crowds which is great, imo.

Anyway, when I got bored, I decided to give this music thing a try. Depending on your class you can learn instruments at level 5. Bards get pretty much all of them right off the bat. If you go to some sites, they have abc files that people have made which you can plop into your LotR documents folder. Then in-game, just type /music to get ready, then /play "song_name.abc" and your character will start playing it. Unfortunately, I was at the end of my trial when I did this, and I was actually drawing a crowd - made some gold to boot as well, lol.

Just save this as an .abc file in notepad and stick it in your username/Documents/The Lord of the Rings Online/Music folder.

If you look at the top, the word Lute is bolded and red. This tells you what instrument the song is intended for. Using a different instrument yields bad sounds, heh. My hobbit was loving the attention playing the Hobbit theme (in Hobbiton!).

But then, you also get bastards that play these kinds of songs in Middle-Earth..

But nothing about LoTR:Online really wanted me to stay and actually pay to play it. Other than the Tolkien refences, the game is mediocre at best. The models are pretty "bleh" even with the high-res texture pack. In DX10, it was looking a bit better, but there's just something missing in the game that I can't put my finger on.

I told my friend that if I bought the lifetime subscription for this game, at least I'd have all the time in the world to let the game mature and get better and more content is knocked out. But until then, the trial period was enough for me to uninstall it after I had my fill.